Good morning. It is Sunday, August 3rd. I'm Ali Valshi. We begin this hour in Washington, D.C., which as of this morning has a new Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, the former Fox TV host, Janine Piro.

President Donald Trump blasted the Republican Senate leadership on

Truth Social to work through the weekend to confirm a backlog of nominees. And while Republicans

did not close a deal they'd been working on to push through dozens of nominees, they did confirm

seven of them, including Piro, Trump's second choice pick for U.S. attorney for D.C. The president was

forced to withdraw his first choice, the right-wing podcaster, Ed Martin, who happens to be the

brother of Trump lawyer and now attorney general, Pam Bondi, over bipartisan concerns about

Martin's extremism, including advocacy for January 6th insurrectionists.

Piro, who's also a former prosecutor and a judge in Westchester County in New York,

is a longtime Trump loyalist and was among the first news hosts named in a lawsuit by Dominion

voting systems for making false claims about the 2020 election.

Piro had been serving as interim U.S.

attorney for the District of Columbia since May, and there are dozens more interim and acting

U.S. attorneys who are approaching the 120-day deadline to serve without being confirmed.

And that's where we find an underreported but crucially important piece of Donald Trump's

struggle to reshape the judiciary, the guardrails against unqualified nominees. Now, at the center of

this is something known as the blue slip. It's an actual blue piece of paper that senators can provide

to the committee that's considering a nomination

signaling their approval of a particular nominee in their state. A negative response,

or no response at all, can prevent a nominee from getting a vote or even a hearing.

In a true social post this week, Trump called on Senate Republicans to eliminate what he called

the blue slip

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